TMNT 2 trailer2:25

Megan Fox is expecting baby number three and, she reckons, son number three — “there’s a karmic lesson I’m learning” she says of having all boys.Source:Getty Images

SUPERMODEl Linda Evangelista famously wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.

Actor Megan Fox won’t get out of bed to make a movie unless the budget is in the $125 to $200 million range and falls under the genre “big action blockbuster”.

Emphasis on “big”.

“I actually just like making action movies,” Fox laughs. “If I’m gonna go watch a movie in a theatre it’s always going to be an action movie. I’m not a small, independent, artsy movie girl; I’m just not. I love these bigger movies — these are the ones I rent, these are the ones I enjoy watching, so I love being in them as well.”

Fox’s movie career began this way (she was a bikini-clad extra in Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II), blew up this way (eye candy in Bay’s Transformers franchise) and continues this way with her latest (Bay-produced) sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of the Shadows.

The kick Fox gets out of doing these movies, she says, is the “level of adrenaline” and the “chaotic process”.

Fox prepares to throw down with some ninjas in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows — she loves the adrenaline and chaos of making action movies (Paramount Pictures)Source:AP

But on TMNT in particular, Fox tends to get something else out of the process, too: a baby.

She was pregnant while filming the first live-action reboot in 2013 (son Bodhi, now two, came out of that — a brother to 3½ year old Noah), and announced her third pregnancy in April by stepping out to promote Out Of the Shadows in Las Vegas with an unmissable bump.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with the Turtles,” the 30-year-old laughs, “I think it’s just, these movies happened to come at a time in my life where all of these goals were ready to come through me ...”

Fittingly, Pete Ploszek, who plays turtle Leonardo, describes Fox as the “mamma bear” of the TMNT set. That could be a byproduct of the fact that, for 99 per cent of the time, she’s the only female on the TMNT set.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“I love being the only girl on set — that’s the way my personal life is as well, I’m surrounded by boys. I have two sons and Brian ... I’m used to being the matriarch or the queen bee — I function really well in that role.

“Not that I’m not a girl’s girl, but I’m also not afraid to be the only girl amongst a bunch of boys.”

... and with Amy Adams at CinemaCon in Las Vegas in April, where she revealed her third pregnancySource:Getty Images

Fox with husband Brian Austin Green in 2011 ...Source:Getty Images

Is Fox crossing her fingers that baby No. 3 will be a girl, then?

“No. I enjoy the relationship between mother and son. Brian wants a girl, of course, because he wants to be a daddy to a little girl, but I just ... I don’t think that’s for me in this lifetime. I feel like I’m the mother of boys and that there’s a karmic lesson there that I’m learning.”

The difference between this pregnancy and Fox’s previous two is the intrigue it has caused, coming as it did after Fox filed for divorce from husband Brian Austin Green in August 2015.

Fox acknowledged the fuss with a sly Instagram post featuring pictures of herself with three co-stars — TMNT’s Will Arnett, Transformers’ Shia LaBeouf, Jake Johnson from TV series The New Girl — captioned “#notthefather”.

Married in 2010, Fox and former 90210 star Green have been together since Fox was an 18-year-old working on the sitcom Hope & Faith. Clearly, a relationship that long is hard to let go: the way Fox casually throws Brian into conversation with Hit suggests it’s now back to family life as usual for the couple.

And unlike most juggling family and career, Fox reckons she’s got the balance pretty much right.

“I don’t work very much — I only work a couple of times a year. Even that is very difficult for me to leave my kids, because obviously I feel completely responsible for them and I don’t like having to leave decisions in other people’s hands.

“But at the same time, working and being independent is such a large part of who I am that if I were to give that up, I think I would suffer as well. I need both of them in my life, so it’s about figuring out when to dedicate the time to which one.”

The good news about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of the Shadows is that it is more worthy of Fox’s dedication than its 2014 predecessor. The general consensus is that Team TMNT figured out what tone they were going for before cameras rolled this time. That made it a “more lighthearted experience,” Fox says.

When the movie begins, intrepid reporter April O’Neil is “still working at Channel 6” and “pursuing some undercover work,” Fox explains.

There’s “a little sparkle” between Casey Jones (played by Stephen Amell) and April O'Neil in Out of the Shadows, says Fox.Source:Supplied

“She’s following a lead she thinks is one thing, then accidentally gets involved in something much bigger, gets herself into trouble and needs the Turtles.”

With Arnett’s cameraman Vernon busy taking the credit for saving the city last time around, April gets a new pal in the shape of Stephen Amell’s hockey mask-wearing vigilante Casey Jones.

Romance is in the air — “as much as there can be in a kids’ movie,” Fox says.

“There’s a little sparkle between the two but they’re not dating and that’s not something I want for April anyway — I like that she isn’t trying to be someone’s girlfriend. That’s a much better message for young girls in general, to disassociate from the idea that you have to couple off.”

That said, April also ends up wearing a sexy schoolgirl outfit in the movie — TMNT’s answer to her leaning provocatively over car engines in Transformers. Doesn’t Fox roll her eyes when she gets to that point in a script these days?

“I actually thought it was funny,” she replies. “I mean, that’s also part of who I am, that’s not something I’m ashamed of. I have a lot of fun with that kind of stuff — I do it tongue-in-cheek. I’m not doing it because I think it’s Shakespeare, I know what it is.”

... and finds a good angle in Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen.Source:Supplied

Fox goes sexy schoolgirl in TMNT: Out of the Shadows ...Source:Supplied

Fox was just 19 when her agent decided she WAS the girl described in the synopsis for Transformers and sent her to audition. The first of Bay’s clanging, banging Autobots vs. Decepticons battles was released in 2007, the second in 2009. With her skill at provocative leaning combined with a knack for attention-grabbing quotes and racy photo shoots, Fox was the hottest thing on Earth for that two-to-three year span.

And it’s a place she has no desire to revisit.

“I was really overwhelmed and felt listless because that wasn’t something I had chased,” Fox says. “It came at me from nowhere and the experience was not enjoyable, at least from where I stand.

“I definitely struggled very deeply with it. I guess we could say I was lost in there somewhere, because I would not wanna repeat that period of time.”

Fox was very good at it, though — knowing exactly what the men’s mags would eat up in interviews, for example. But she bats away any suggestion she may have enjoyed playing with her image.

What sticks with her from that time is an overwhelming sense of “paranoia”.

“I’m not afraid to be the only girl amongst a bunch of guys” — Fox in TMNT: Out of the Shadows with Amell, Will Arnett and yet more blokes.Source:AP

As in: “You’re changing in a hotel room and you’re terrified that someone is taking your picture and all you wanna do is just keep your body private ... I didn’t feel safe. I never felt safe.”

It’s probably for her own good then, that Fox is “not ambitious”. This is something she swears, even though as a 15-year-old in Florida she begged her mother to take her to LA for auditions.

“I feel like ambition is when you’re going out hunting down projects because you have all of these things that you want to accomplish. I definitely don’t have that,” she laughs. “I have a more relaxed approach where I allow it to come to me and I just try to filter the right material.

“I was always this way,” she swears again. “That’s why it’s so weird that I managed to be in any of these movies ... Because they’re huge films and there are so many people gunning for these opportunities, so it’s very strange that I ended up getting them.”

There’s “so much more to life” than being a workaholic, she concludes.

Besides having her baby, the only work on Fox’s horizon is returning to sitcom The New Girl for another “half season or so” at the end of the year.

Fox — with co-star Jake Johnson — found her sarcastic, comedic groove during a guest run in TV sitcom New Girl this year.Source:TEN

Her sarcastic and status quo-shaking guest run on the show earlier this year — filling in while Zooey Deschanel was on maternity leave — went better than anyone expected.

“People are always surprised that I can handle doing comedy,” she shrugs. “But that’s where I feel like I’m actually the strongest in terms of acting and entertainment.”

If nothing else, her work on the series served as a reminder that Fox is never going to stick to the plans Hollywood might have had for her.

She reckons rebellion is just part of her “spiritual DNA”.

“I’ve done stuff that no one else, definitely not an actress, would ever dream of doing because it’s too frightening. People often acquiesce to this soulless ... giant conglomerate which can chew people up and spit them out. People fear it because they have so much power.